Messieurs the Princes came into Madame's salon, where I was, and after they saluted they came to me and paid me a thousand compliments. M. le Prince bore witness in particular that he had been very much pleased when Guiteau assured him of my repentance for the great repugnance that I had felt for him. The compliments ended, we avowed the aversion that we had felt for one another. He confessed that he had been delighted when I fell sick of the smallpox, that he had passionately wished that I might be disfigured by it, and that I might be left with some deformity,—in short, he said that nothing could have added to the hatred that he felt for me. I avowed to him that I had never felt such joy as I felt when he was put in prison, that I had strongly wished that he might be kept there, and that I had thought of him only to wish him evil. This reciprocal enlightenment lasted a long time, and it cheered and amused the company and ended in mutual assurances of friendship.
During the interview the tumult of a great public fête was heard. At sight of Condé Paris had been seized by one of her sudden infatuations.
At the gates of the Palais Royal the masses mounted guard night and day to prevent the abduction of the King. It was generally supposed that the Queen would try to follow the Cardinal.
The Frondeurs were masters of Paris; their hour had come, and they held it in their power to prove that they had led France into adventures because they had formed a plan which they considered better than the old plan. But if there were any among them who were thinking of reform, their good intentions were not perceptible. The people of the past resembled the people of our day; they thought little of the public suffering. Interest in the actions of the great, or in the actions of the people whose positions gave them relative greatness, excluded interest in the general welfare. The rivalries and the personal efforts of the higher classes were the public events of France. Parliament was working along its own lines, hoping to gain control of the State, to hold a monopoly of reforms, and to break away from the nobility. The nobility, jealous of the "long robes," had directly addressed the nation's depths: the bourgeoisie and the mobility.
Retz had supreme hope: to be a Cardinal. Condé hoped to be Prime Minister. Gaston had staked a throw on all the games. Mme. de Longueville dreamed of new adventures; and the Queen, still guided by her far-off lover, laboured in her own blind way upon a plan to benefit her little brood. She looked upon France, upon the people, and upon the Court as enemies; she had concentrated her mind upon one object; she meant to deceive them all and turn events to her own advantage. By the grace of the general competition of egotism, falsehood, broken promises, and treason, the autumn of 1651 found the Spaniards in the East, civil war in the West, the Court in hot pursuit of the rebels, want and disease stalking the land, and La Grande Mademoiselle still in suspense. In the spring during a period of thirty-six hours she had supposed that she was about to marry Condé. Condé's wife had been grievously sick from erysipelas in the head; to quote Mademoiselle's words: "The disease was driven inward, which gave people reason for saying that were she to die I might marry M. le Prince."
At that critical moment Mademoiselle freely unfolded her hopes and fears; she said:
Madame la Princesse lingered in that extremity three days, and during all that time the marriage was the subject of my conversation with Préfontaine. We did not speak of anything else. We agitated all those questions. What gave me reason to speak of them was that, to add to all that I heard said, M. le Prince came to see me every day. But the convalescence of Madame la Princesse closed the chapter for the time being and no one thought of it any more.
In the course of the summer the Princess Palatine, who supposed that she could do anything because she had effected, or to say the least concluded the union of the Frondes, offered to marry Mademoiselle to the King "before the end of September." Mme. de Choisy, another prominent politician, exposed the conditions of the bargain to Mademoiselle, who recorded them in the following lucid terms:
Mme. de Choisy said to me: "The Princess Palatine is such a blatant beggar that you will have to promise her three hundred écus in case she makes your affair a success." I said "yes" to everything. "And," pursued Mme. de Choisy, "I wish my husband to be your Chancellor. We shall pass the time so agreeably, because la Palatine will be your steward; you will give her a salary of twenty thousand écus; she will sell all the offices in the gift of your house,—so you may imagine that it will be to her interest to make your affair succeed. We will have a play given at the Louvre every day. She will rule the King." Those were the words she used! One may guess how charmed I was at the idea of being in such a state of dependence! Evidently she thought that she was giving me the greatest pleasure in the world.
Although Mademoiselle did not go as far as to say "no," she ceased to say "yes" to everything. Her reason for doing so was baseless. She had acquired the conviction that the young King, Louis XIV., loved the tall cousin who seemed so old to his thirteen-year mind.[153] La Grande Mademoiselle appalled him; her abrupt ways and her explosions of anger drove back his timid head into its tender shell; but she had persuaded herself that he wished to marry her. And she was so sure of her facts that she dropped the oars provided by Mme. de Choisy, and sat up proudly in her rudderless bark, without sail or compass. She believed that the King loved her, she was thankful to be at rest, and she left to her supposed lover the care of the royal betrothal; she sighed ingenuously: "That way of becoming Queen would have pleased me more than the other." That is easily understood; however, nothing came of it. Anne of Austria had sworn to her niece that she would give her the King; but when Mademoiselle's back was turned she, the Queen, said stiffly: "He would not be for her nose even were he well grown!"[154]